We've had similar experiences then, but I've arrived at a different conclusion. For me having to constantly babysit it, review and debug its output, and go thro

We've had similar experiences then, but I've arrived at a different conclusion. For me having to constantly babysit it, review and debug its output, and go through many rounds of back and forth without getting not just quality code, but working code at all, takes more time and effort than if I had done the research and written the code myself. You're right that actually typing code is not our main activity. It's the last part of the process. To get there we need to understand the domain and the problem, do some research and come up with a design and implementation plan, and maybe do some exploratory work. LLMs can certainly help with writing boilerplate code, and it's what I've found them most useful for as well. They're also useful as slightly better rubber ducks, to get ideas I might not have thought about, or to assist with design, architecture, testing, etc. All this is fine, if we ignore the hallucination issues. My problem is when I start asking them to write anything more sophisticated. Even when I give them a fairly detailed implementation plan (that they've helped me write), or point out an issue in great detail, more often than not they will lead me down wrong rabbit holes, produce non-working code I have to fix, and just waste my time. There have been very few cases where they've actually suggested a fix that turned out to be correct, or where what they've produced is usable, even after many iterations. > Now they simply have more time to do these activities That's the thing. I still have to do all those things you mentioned, while also babysitting an extremely confident junior engineer. This is why I feel that these tools are making me _less_ productive overall.